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Are I am the only one experiencing #864642 (vmxnet3: Reports suspect GRO implementation on vSphere hosts / one VM crashes)? Unluckily I still do not have got any answer on my report so that I may help to track this issue down.

Detached DRBD (diskless)

In the past I setup some new Pacemaker clustered nodes with a fresh Debian Stretch installation. I followed our standard installation guide, created also shared replicated DRBD storage, but whenever I tried to mount the ext4 storage DRBD detached the disks on both node sides with I/O errors. After recreating it, using other storage volumes and testing my ProLiant hardware (whop I thought it had got a defect..) it still occurs, but somewhere in the middle of testing, a quicker setup without LVM it worked fine, hum..

Much later I found this (only post at this time about it) on the DRBD-user mailinglist: [0]
This means, if you use the combination of VMware-Product -> Debian Stretch -> local Storage -> DRBD -> LVM -> ext4 you will be affected by this bug. This happens, because VMware always publishs the information, that the guest is able to support the “WRITE SAME” feature, which is wrong. Since the DRBD version, which is also shipped with Stretch, DRBD now also supports WRITE SAME, so it tries to use this feature, but this fails then.
This is btw the same reason, why VMware users see in their dmesg this:

WRITE SAME failed.Manually zeroing.

As a workaround I am using now systemd, to disable “WRITE SAME” for all attached block devices in the guest. Simply run the following:

Pacemaker failovers with DRBD+LVM do not work

If you use a DRBD with a nested LVM, you already had to add the following lines to your /etc/lvm/lvm.conf in past Debian releases (assuming that sdb and sdc are DRBD devices):

filter = [ “r|/dev/sdb.*|/dev/sdc.*|” ]
write_cache_state = 0

Wit Debian Stretch this is not enough. Your failovers will result in a broken state on the second node, because it can not find your LVs and VGs. I found out, that killing lvmetad helps. So I also added a global_filter (it should be used for all LVM services):

global_filter = [ “r|/dev/sdb.*|/dev/sdc.*|” ]

But this also didn’t helped.. My only solution was to disable lvmetad (which I am also not using at all). So adding this all – in combination – works now for me and failovers are as smooth as with Jessie:

since I had to change my old “heartbeat v1” setup to an more modern Corosync+Pacemaker setup, because “heartbeat v1” does not support systemd (it first looks like it is working, but it fails on service start/stops), I want to share a simple setup:

Two nodes (node1-1 and node1-2)

Active/Passive setup

Shared IP (here: 123.123.123.123/24)

Internal network on eth1 (here: 192.168.99.0/24)

DRBD shared storage

LVM on top of DRBD

Multiple services, depending also on the DRBD/LVM storage

First you have to activate the jessie-backports repository, because the cluster stack is not available/broken in Debian Jessie. Install the required packages with:

The last (bold marked) lines made me some headache. In short they define that the DRBD device on the active node has to be the primary one and that it is required to start the “APCLUSTER” on the host, since the LVM, filesystem and services require to access its data.

Just a short copy paste howto for an simple use case with not so much deep explanaitions..

I have updated geoip in wheezy-backports today from version 1.5.0-3~bpo70+1 to 1.6.2-4~bpo70+1, which includes also the new generators for the City and ASN database. This is also a prerequisite for the upcoming geoip-database updates!

For the otrs users: Now you can also install otrs 3.3.9-3~bpo70+1 in Wheezy, instead of the realy old version 3.2.11-1~bpo70+1.

Gallery

Hi, until the end of last week I were my first time in Egypt at Hurghada. Interesting country and culture but I have to think about it if I would travel again to Egypt :D I also travelled to Luxor … Continue reading →

I have just backported the php-redis (php5-redis) 2.2.5-1~bpo70+1 package for Debian Wheezy. Thanks to the ftp-masters for their quick ACCEPT :)
Now you can install and use the redis PHP extension from the offical repositories, see: